November, 2019

• 20 November

  Merkel’s party clueless about where to lead Germany

  

  Bloomberg For the longest time, Angela Merkel was Germany and under her the center-right Christian Democrats were the dominant political force in the European Union. Today the party is a shambles and its new leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), can’t seem to straighten it out. Just last month, the CDU suffered a historic beating in the eastern region of Thuringia. Mike ...

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• 20 November

  Mythology of Big Tech

  

  “Everyone seems to agree … that these companies are fundamentally different … [and] the old rules of capitalism simply do not apply to them” —Economist Thomas Philippon, author of “The Great Reversal:How America Gave Up on Free Markets” The public face of American capitalism is Big Tech. Its constituent firms — Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, to name a few ...

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• 20 November

  Trump EPA makes excuses for polluters

  

  The Trump administration has developed a way to make pollution sound appealing. President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a plan to relax regulations to allow Americans to be exposed to more dirty air. But the agency has dressed it up to look like it’s just advocating the use of stronger, more transparent science. The policy, sometimes called the ...

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• 20 November

  TikTok is aiming at a bigger audience than US senators

  As US political opposition hardens to TikTok, the globally popular video app from Beijing-based ByteDance Inc., some inside the company want to find ways to make the business appear to be less Chinese. That’s a smart move, aimed less at critics in Congress and more at two other East Coast power centers: Madison Avenue and Wall Street. TikTok delivers short, ...

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• 20 November

  Watch for sparks as jet engines hit their limits

  Earlier this week, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Chris Bryant examined the ongoing troubles for advanced jet engines used on today’s commercial airliners. These engines now seem to be reaching their technical limits, and as Bryant says, we may be asking too much of the technology. That’s not great news for the companies making those turbines, or for those flying the aircraft. ...

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• 20 November

  Macron wants to slam the door on expansion of EU

  

  The French government has made it clear what President Emmanuel Macron meant by a reform of the European Union (EU) accession process, which he sees as a prerequisite to the bloc’s further enlargement. The proposed process wouldn’t be much of an improvement on the current one; rather, Macron appears to be trying to drown the issue of further EU enlargement ...

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• 20 November

  HP doesn’t need Xerox, which may have been the point

  

  After HP Inc. rebuffed Xerox Holdings Corp.’s attempted $34 billion takeover attempt, don’t be surprised if the printer company’s next step is to say, “You don’t buy us, we buy you.” But don’t expect any offer to be generous. A counteroffer from its bigger rival may have been Xerox’s plan all along. The two companies have been involved in tentative ...

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• 20 November

  How to overcome losing 600,000 people a year

  

  You know times are hard in provincial South Korea when the guy selling walkers and hearing aids can only make ends meet by day trading. Ho Cheol Lee, 52, keeps his eyes on flashing stock quotes while his shop, crammed with wheelchairs, canes and other equipment for seniors, sits empty. Lee has run the store for roughly two decades, and ...

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• 20 November

  US futures decline on China tensions; bonds advance

  

  Bloomberg American equity-index futures declined along with stocks in Europe and Asia after the US Senate passed legislation supporting Hong Kong protesters, drawing a rebuke from China and potentially complicating trade talks. Bonds gained. Contracts on all three major US indexes declined, signalling a weak open in New York. The 10-year Treasury yield fell to a three-week low and the ...

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• 20 November

  World-beating stock gain in Hong Kong falters after two days

  

  Bloomberg A world-beating stock gain is quickly unraveling in Hong Kong, showing how fast sentiment can change as protests convulse the city. The Hang Seng Index lost 0.8% on Wednesday. It had surged 2.9% in two days, with volatility sinking 11% in that time. Short-selling volume reached 16% of total equity turnover — near a record of 20% in August ...

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